Adventures of a Latter Day Coosie #6

It is over. We are done.  Stick a fork in us......that is it, we are done in more ways than one.  We are pooped.  We sit down and relax and enjoy a little of what is left of the food.  Man, what a mess.  There are dirty Dutch ovens, pots, pans, plates, knives, and cups everywhere.

This is what it seems like.

 Skip is super efficient about keeping things cleaned up, but as the crunch gets closer he gets busy with other cooking duties and chores everything backs up on us.  No matter, because we don't have to do anything 'till morning.  We'll clean up the mess a little later.  We're going to go and listen to some music inside the big tent and check out some of the vendors. Rest!!!

Skip and I just returned from "inside" where we listened to several excellent entertainers.  I think we almost went to sleep just sitting for a spell.  Just a little tired since we didn't get much sleep last night because of the horses.

Now that the big meal is behind us we can start thinking about the menu for breakfast.  The plan is to have German Puff Cake, which is a variation of a pancake.  My wife, Linda,  found the recipe in one of her cook books after I mentioned to her that I would like to find something different to cook so that the judges didn't get just another country pancake.

 To go with the pancake recipe we will enter the syrup category with a recipe for Hen Butter that Jerry Baird gave me a while back.

To this add 1 cup of Coke and stir...

 The biscuit recipe is out of Grady Spear's "Cowboy in the Kitchen" cookbook.  He calls it a Nut Mash Biscuit.

For the coffee entry we brought New Orleans Blend coffee from Austin, Texas. It has Chicory in the blend. Baird swears by it and I have used it a few times in the past when I can get it. It has a nice and interesting taste. The gravy recipe is from my mother, Libbie, but with a little twist. I decided to add a little sausage. Hope it works. Oh, and on the Hen Butter you can't let it boil too long or it will get real thick which it is supposed to do when making the "butter". We just boiled it a little so it would remain thin like a syrup.Now it is Sunday morning well before daylight, and the horses were at it again with their bad habit of banging with their hooves, only not quite as bad. From the looks of things--no stars in the sky--there may be a little moisture coming our way today. By the time the sun came up it was evident that we needed to prepare the camp for rain. We got an extra fly strung up over the cooking area that should keep the rain out of the cooking utensils. We had to bring all the saddles and stuff we didn't want to get wet in under the wagon sheet. This is going to make it way to cozy in the cooking area. John was up and over at our camp bright and early. Randy and Robin are present to observe the Masters, hee, hee, at work. If they only knew......they could have picked any camp present and learned more....but we offered a lot of fun too.

Skip is taking care of the gravy making and fighting the light rain under the makeshift canvas cover.  He has the sausage done up just right and has added flour to the sausage grease and slowly adding milk until he gits the right consistency.  The sausage was added somewhere in the middle of the flour and milk.  It is gonna be hum, him, good!

John is handling the biscuit duties.  I figure he got all the burned ones out of his system yesterday so we shouldn't have to worry about him and the biscuits.   The problem with this particular entry is we have to keep a watch out for the Light Crust Dough Girl, Sandy Sullivan because she will eat up the dough before it even becomes a biscuit.  I must admit she has good taste 'cause it really is good.  I had just a smidgen you understand.

I am trying my hand at making the German Puff Cake.  I  haven't make them in a big Dutch oven so the final product should be quite interesting.  The mixture turned out real good except we found that if the oven is really hot before you put in the mixture you will not need any coals on the bottm.....just the top.  This is what Robin figured out while they were observing the so called masters.  It fluffed up sort of like a meringue.  The bottom got a little over done in some areas.  The portion we turned in to the judges looked nice and fluffy, even though the fluff dies done quite rapidly after removing form the heat.

The Hen Butter turned out real good.  The ingredients are:  eggs, flour, sugar, and molasses.  I couldn't find the black molasses the recipe calls for so I had to substitute maple based syrup.  I think just--just right--is the way it turned out.

The New Orleans coffee shoud be the Teehumptumdinktum.  I added a little bit of cinnamon to the enrry. Hope they like our "eye opener".

I'm not sure how Silky does the tickets for breakfast.  There aren't many floks lined up to eat breadfast, just a few people milling around.  We have invited everone that comes into the camp to have a sample of the fixins.

The organizing crew and judges have done all their deliberations on the breakfast entries and are ready to give the awards for yesterday and today.

There is still a little light drizzling rain and Silky has summoned everone over to the headquarters tent for the award presentations.  A nice quaint little gathering of cooks, helpers, organizers, vendors, friends, on lookers,and in the distance those dad gum loud Percherons.  Some of the folks are wearing their bright yellow slickers, some with unbrellas, and still others in the tradition of the Old West,

just getting weter than all get out.  Silky introduces a few people instrumental in making the Festival of the West happen, then she gets right in to the results She calls out the winners of the potatoes and that went to Hanging Tree from Bandera, Texas.  Yeah Texas!! Second was Curley Cue from Las Vegas, Nevada. Third place went to us the Calk-Clark Wagon from El Paso, Texasl  Yeah us!! Well, at least we did better than our last outing. This time we got a "smell".  Along with the checks the winners were presented with a beautiful rosette style ribbon commorating the place in the competition and the event itself.  Listed below are all of the results.

Best Potatoes
1.  Hanging Tree, Bandera, Texas
2.  Curley Cue Camp, Las Vegas, Nevada
3.  Calk-Clark Wagon

Best Meat
1.  Curley Cue Camp
2.  Biscuit Flats, Chandler, Arizona
3.  Hanging Tree

Best Bread
1.  Curley Cue Camp
2.  Biscuit Flats
3.  Hanging Tree

Best Beans
1.  Curley Cue Camp
2.  Biscuit Flats
3.  Hanging Tree

Best Dessert
1.  Calk-Clark Wagon
2.  Manflo Wagon, Nuevo, California
3.  J. Quick Wagon, Santa Ana, California

OVERALL LUNCH WINNER- CURLE CUE CAMP

AUTHENTIC WAGON
1.  Curley Cue
2.  Calk-Clark
3.  J. Quick Wagon

Fartherst Traveled-Hanging Tree

CHARLIE GOODNIGHT/POT WRASSLER BUCKLE- CALK-CLARK WAGON

Best Coffee
1.  Curley Cue
2.  Cowgirls Forever, Desert Hills, Arizzona

Best Biscuits
1.  Curley Cue Camp
2.  Cowgirls Forever

Best Gravy
1.  Calk-Clark
2.  Curley Cue

Best Flapjacks
1.  Calk-Clark
2.  Manflo

Best Syrup
1.  Hanging Tree
2.  Calk-Clark

OVERALL BREAKFAST WINNER-CALK-CLARK WAGON

After we recieved the 3rd place award for the potatoes there was a bit of a let down each time they called winners of another category.  You always want to hear them call your camp to the front to recieve an award. They didn't call us for the next trhee categories and here we were thinking ....again...."We cooked a better entry than to not even get a 3rd plac."  After a dry spell you think "just what the heck is wrong with our food?"  Then along comes a renewal of your faith in your ability as a cook when you hear your name called. for a first place in dessert which we thought was our best enry.    It takes a while in this competition to learn that there are no bad cooks and many, many of them are exceptional.  So, to us, when we win something it really is special.

Three Cooks

The authenticity of the wagon and camp was the next category to be recognized.  Curley Cue was recoznized, and rightfully so because their wagon and accoutrements were tremendous.  Then another surprise, they called us as the second place wagon..  That made me really proud.  I guess a small, even teensy bit of vanity or ego set in that someone recognized the the Calk-Clark Wagon was pretty good after all and the work that went into restoring it finally paid off.

The overall winner for lunch was announded and Curley Cue took home the prize.  Breakfast winners, starting with the coffee was next in the award line up.  Now here I am thinking that the new Orleans blend was going to do the trick and the cinnamobn would just put it over the top.  Nope!  Wrong again.  Curley Cue spanked up again.  I did hear later that the judges were over heard talking about our entry saying it was flavored and that "they didn't have laavored coffee on the trail."  Guess the cinnamon and Chickry which were both available during the trail drives was a little too much for these judges.

Two movie stars.

I was getting disappointed 'long about this time and couldn't hear or mabbe just didn't want to hear when they called the winners of the next two catagories.  Skip said "get up there"  they are calling our name.   That happened for the gravy and flapjacks and we pulled out a second on the syrup.  We had won the Overall Breadfast and the next award was the coveted Charlie Goodnight belt buckle.  I thought for sure this award was going to be presented to John and Sandy Sullivan for all their efforts as the host wagon for the festival. Nope, wrong again!  They called me.........very humbling.  This was and is a very special award.  They awarded me the buckle which I immediately thought was a problem because this is a TEAM sport or event and there isn't just one person this should be awarded to.....so I asked and recieved permission from Silky to have all the members of the crew a Charlie Goodnight buckle made.  The buckles were ordered as soon as I returned to El Paso.  Now we can all be proud of winning the Festival of the West Charlie Goodnight buckle.

A Model.

The awards are over, the rain has stopped and the sky is bgeginning to clear.  We now have several hours facing us before the loading is complete.  Ordinarily we would have been slowly taking things down and loading them onto the trailer since yesterday, but the rain qnd preparing breakfast put the quietus on loading early.

Thanks to John Sullivan, we had a choice spot for our campsite duiring the evernt, however, the downside was our dcamp was set up towards the front of the campsite area and the other participants were able to get their rigs in first to load their gear and wagons.  There was only enough room for one or two rigs at a time to load and just one way in and one way out.  Now we have to wait 'till all of the other wagons are loaded and gone before we will be able to laod.  We have pretty well buttoned up all the small stuff like taking down the teepee, flys, putting all the "iron" together, and placing the saddles where they can be loaded easily.  Seems like we have a million pounds of gear and just a little earlier we were so proud to display it all at our campsite.  In fact just about every other thought was why in the blankety blank blank did we need all this blankety blank blank stuff?  The only consolation at this point is we did receive a 2nd place for camp authenticity.

Another movie actor.

Now we have to wait our turn to get the goose neck trailer in where we can load.  We are all really tired and anxious to get on the road.  Earlier I was a little concerned if we were ging to be able to get out of the camp because of all the mud.  But luckily there was enought sun to substantially dry out the ground so that getting stuck was not a problem.  Sany Sullivan has taken their camper and headed back to Ft.Thomas.  John has stayed to help us load.  Thank goodness!  As soon as the loading is complete we will head out as well.

We are on the road now enjoying a beautiful drive.  For at least a little way we will get to enjoy the view before it gets dark.  As we go through the mounrtains we see many trees broken down from what appears to have been a bad snow storm.  We were getting really tired so we stopped at a Sonic Drive Inn and had a humongous burger and fries with a large soda water.  It was really getting cool,  no correct that, it was getting down right cold and we had to eat in the pickup....but the hamburger and fries were absolutely delicious.

Skip and I are going to spend the night with John and Sandy and tomorrow we are going to hitch up one of the wagons and drive it to town.  This will be a special treat for both of us since nither one of us had ever dirven a team.  I am also looking rorward to seeing John's blacksmith shop where he does all his wagon building.  Sandy and their friend Rusty built the shop for John a couple years ago.  Sandy does a lot of building down in Mexico and other oplaces for the Houses for Humanity program, so her skill level in building is quite refined.

I forget how long the trip to John's place took us, but we were ready to relax for a while when we got there---that's forsure.  John's brother and sister-in-law were there for a short visit.  We set up for a while talking about the events of the last few days and exchanging ideas and generally shootinbg the bull till it occured to us that we were dead tired ....and we all turned in for the night.  Aaahhhhh, a real bed.

Getting the team harnessed

You there pilgrim, let's get movin.

Hi Yo Silver....this way.....

John Sullivan

John's shop

Thank you for following us on this outing.  We had a great time. Met lots of fine people and hopefully you were able to take something away from this dialog and these pictures.  Hope to see you on down the trail....and stay tuned to the next blog.....possibly a get together with some Boy Scouts in 2013.